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If you own an electric car, you know what range anxiety is. You’re on the highway, you’re miles from your destination, and your car’s power level is fading fast. Sweaty palms, pounding heartbeat, queasy, pit of your stomach feeling — yep, range anxiety.

The Illinois Tollway is mulling a remedy — smart-powered lanes that charge electric vehicles as they’re zipping along the highway. Coils embedded underneath the pavement would wirelessly charge cars as they pass over. A receiver plate attached to the car’s undercarriage sops up the zap. Charge while you drive.

The tollway has a location in mind. The agency is planning a $4 billion rebuild of the Tri-State Tollway between Balmoral Avenue near O’Hare International Airport and 95th Street in Bridgeview. Smart-powered lanes could become part of that rebuild.

On this or any back-to-work Monday, an electrified Tri-State might not ease your commute. But we welcome the Tollway’s investigation of the idea as metropolitan Chicago braces for evolutions in transportation. Innovations come at us from all directions: Driverless cars, drones that carry goods or even passengers, subterranean superhighways … there’s no shortage of concepts that promise to transform the way we get around. A sharp increase in the share of all vehicles that will be powered by electricity looks inevitable. Modernized infrastructure has to not only accompany these changes, but anticipate them.

The idea of smart-powered lanes intrigues us. Pilot projects to electrify roads are in the works or under consideration in California, Colorado and Utah. Sweden powered up the world’s first segment of electrified roadway in 2018, but the stretch is just 1.2 miles. And the technology differs — Sweden embedded an electrified rail into the road. The electricity is produced 5 centimeters under the surface, so there’s no danger of motorists or passengers getting zapped.

The technology the Tollway is considering isn’t yet in regular use anywhere. There’s currently no price tag. The agency envisions billing electric vehicle motorists for use of smart-powered lanes, perhaps via transponders similar to the ones used now to pay tolls. Charging motorists who use the lanes makes sense, but knowing how much money would be generated, and what the overall price tag would be, would help clarify whether the project is justified.

Will electric car use be prevalent enough to warrant smart-powered lanes? Right now, electric car sales represent around 1 percent of total car sales in the U.S. But the arrow’s pointing straight up for the electric car market; automotive journalists are writing about the impending twilight of the internal combustion engine. Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett has said his company expects two-thirds of all vehicles sold by 2030 to be either electric or hybrid, and his company is planning its future accordingly, the New York Times reported. General Motors expects to have 20 electric car models in its fleet by 2030.

Public concern about air pollution will only accelerate the trend — and make drivers more accepting of electric vehicles. Advances in battery technology and construction of more charging stations gradually will ease range anxiety. So would smart-powered lanes.

It makes sense for the Tollway to be thinking about this as the Tri-State project launches. Just as it makes sense for every transportation agency in Chicago and Illinois to spend money not just on infrastructure maintenance or replacement, but on innovation. That’s why we’re keeping an open mind about such notions as the boring of underground tunnels to link O’Hare and the Loop: What if it matures into a smart idea?

A decade from now we’ll know the answers to that question and its big brother: Did this state and city capitalize on location, location, location by deploying new technology to improve transportation? Or did Illinois and Chicago squander their transportation advantages and fall behind the rest of the nation and world?